Autumn in New Orleans

New Orleans summer is like living inside a dog’s mouth

The city is a ball the beast spits out in September

Rolling out into the grass, always wet

Autumn comes in a taunt breeze

A few weeks of Northeastern normalcy

No golden orange deciduous shifts

The dog peeks cockeyed at the limbs

The leaves frump at once to fall

The city has no time for change

The hurricanes pandemic hovering threat passes

The waters cackling for return in the rotation

The dog sits on the porch for a breather

Chase that ball in a couple of weeks for the frost

Humid cold slobber mouth back in the dog

Warm enough till February parades, the playtime

Makes the hound howl release

The ball rolls out for Jazz Fest in a second line

Season boils crawfish red in magnolia white

Waiting for the canine to bring the stormy heat

Once more  

An apology to both of us

I am sorry for the words

There were too many

I spilt like flicked ash with black flecks

Scorched rolling papers

I should have kept the watch

The timing was intrusive like an obnoxious alarm

I should have asked if it was ok

I think I knew the answer and it wasn’t

I got caught up in the breakers, the undertow

Of hope like the tide was on a cycle other than the moon

Like I could lasso the Earth’s satellite

And feel this gravity between us as something

Commensurately greater

Imagining your dark side

Like I was the sun for a flash

And I could see everything

I apologize for guesswork dreams of who you were

Why we met and when the tide was scheduled to drift out

I saw the sea turtles crawling up from the sand

Multitudes of kindred shells dodging gulls from first breath

I wanted you to tell me every one of their names

As I read the lines on their shells like road maps

Of every bad thing I ever felt like the world was less hard

I am sorry for not slowing down

You saw the sunset and I kept spitting words like a dodo

I see how afraid I was and projected my fears onto you

Extinct and all I wish is I would have kept quiet

Held your hand and watched the sunset not saying a thing

While the light lasted

Proust Questionnaire

 
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
My partner after a full day, spent, silent with that look, and the deep breath turning the light out knowing this won’t be the last time.

2. What is your greatest fear?
Being eaten by Cookie Monster.  That goes way back.

3. Which historical figure do you identify with?
Soren Kierkegaard

4. Which living person do you most admire?
This guy in the Quarter I saw playing two trumpets at once while in perfect tune or Malala Yousafzai

5. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
When I feel like a cantankerous hermit writer cliché and want to drown in a bottle of cheap draught and say prost to my demons.  I also deplore that I used prost in a Proust questionnaire.

6. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Passive aggressiveness, it’s feeble, indirect, and maddening to devotees of true debate

7. What is your greatest extravagance?
A Magic the Gathering card collection or my music collection

8. On what occasion do you lie?
Under oath when they pull the Bible out and I act like I am swearing to a God connecting to the book, because justice is not blind in America.  Other than that I am extremely principled.

9. What do you dislike most about your appearance?
My busted mouth from an accident from when I was a kid.

10. When and where were you happiest?
Being a poet, I remember feelings like painted portraits.  The happiest I ever felt existed and then was marred, but never replicated.  So I’ll go with something else like when I sold my house after Katrina and I finally got to move on in life from living in other peoples’ house.

11. If you could change one thing about yourself what would it be?
Be able to bullshit and not feel like a schmuck, I would probably relate to more people and have more fun than being so damn analytical.

12. If you could change one thing about your family what would it be?

I would take away my mom’s type one diabetes and give my dad hair.  My mom’s probably going to die from it and my dad seemed to want hair back in the day.  That and a life partner for me to pal around with who will laugh at my jokes.

13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I am still standing.

14. If you died and came back as a person or thing what do you think it would be?
A platypus

15. What is your most treasured possession?
A commemorative hockey puck my creative writing teacher gave me as class award in high school.  He died of cancer and was an awesome human.  Generally stuff is pretty irrelevant.

16. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Running parallel and never tangent to self-actualization living a boring damn life like Sisyphus rolling the boulder for eternity, but never realizing what you’re doing.

17. Who are your heroes in real life?
Dogs

18. What is it you most dislike?
Plastic grocery store commercial bullshit greed-lust sucking up saccharine homogenized life into a giant vat of the same in the name of consolidating the planet’s financial resources at the expense of everything that is worth a damn.

19. How would you like to die?
Old, at home through self-administered pharmacological suicide after having had time to say goodbye to my loved ones; that or instantly saving the life of someone I deeply care about.

20. What is your motto?
Life is a choice, love or fear; choose.

Bukowski’s Birthday 8/16/2014 International House New Orleans part 1

The gritty nut chucked raucous

Spring a drum of cocktail dresses for Bukowski

Flung spirits, the marriage of taunt legs and crash comments

About preparation and debris

Cold fish sucking the mesh of Thursday night’s lament

Giving in to the weekend asking runts to be real

Grab duck feet and hunt like a god damn veteran for poetry

Playing still guts and nose bleeds on Tom Waits’ drunk piano

The pony bets and crab struts back to the betting window

A flag hat with a mortar rim shirt-tail in the black ink

Hegemony of dirt clumped to a photo op

International fashion hotel curling masochists

Where are all the fat women?

Hank says, Write because your god damn have to

Licking rolling papers and mace

Showing up three hours late

Yelling at the first bastard to complain

Like the ruck sack limp job of too drunk to fuck

Up right slam it like a knife

Grin like the blood was begging for a riot

The perfume and the manicure was all an act

For the moment when somebody yelled

Hell, god damn hell

What are all these pretty faces mugging skid row for class

All these dead faces wanting to talk like fine birds

Racing for an address to yell for a status perch

Ca caw!  Ca Choo!

Lying flat so she can take it behind the stride still crunch

That the spot light of standing was not as horrendous

As the wrinkles in her slip made her work

Get me the hell out of here

To a shit motel room and fuck with the lights off

Like smack damn geniuses

Posing and lonely church of the venereal

Trying poems about sprinters and drunks

Running races of who can find the glutton first

As if the hell in the eight to five was not begging for a miracle

In a smoky hollow to bend time backwards

To appreciate disgust and drone on without scrambling for the mask

The people in their god damn masks

Posing like generals of what the press are singing

God damn happy birthday to a man who hated holidays

Said after he died they’d want to dig him up

Do things and look at me grabbing Chinaski’s god damn ass

Rumbling and grinning like warm necro-masturbation

For the lovely ones to slurp his crab rusted ball sack

Mouth it grinning yum tum, slurp! slurp!

This is a joke, this uniting of dead souls

Guffawing about hipster jizz mops and boomer vomit

Wrestling tailor cut jackets and white linen cunt wraps

The smiles, the grins in an opera of tarpon cigars

Flopping for preservation on the wall

Stuff me Hank like a taxidermist wet dream

Bleed me like a slut felon wandering at the crass break

The sharks are out begging to be murdered

Give me a dive bar goldmine and a PBR

Grin from the bottom of a urinal

Remembering the fun times of reading Factotum

In the parking lot of an abortion clinic

Waiting in that window from when she gives you the call

The juices spent, but the drugs linger

It takes her an extra hour of phasing bodies

To funnel out like aliens paying toll to afternoons of bloodless freedom

Pew-squatters gawk in my rear-view mirror

Bukowski sits over my steering wheel 

Laughing for a nightmare coughing up pubes 

Smoothed out into vomit

She shoots out to leave

Nightingale swarms concrete

The bend in her dress turns a man out

Bukowski’s Birthday 8/16/2014 International House New Orleans part 2

Shooting from both ends for a word

A god damn aria of beauty

Thinking about elephant hills, mounds and mounds

Of midnights broken into crab shells smashed

Into pastures of stories strung out and fired

Lit like a damn demon crawling scared

That the words might run out

The beast might be stuffed with language of things to lose

Men with consequences get gaunt faces of pressed cuffs

Tall enough angles bedding down in stripper stilettos

So she can get hot for him

Like a God

To read at the microphone

Hum, baby hum on the meat pie

Branded and homely to now wanting to be cool

Know that this place is hipster craft cocktail Valhalla

The magic trash is incendiary

See the punch bin of gut poetry

Breeding tire fires for a chance to be a dancer

A frosted whiskey knot barfly gnash of wind and booze

Signed out and black at the father of penned smut

Designer dresses purring, pimped thousand dollar shoes

For the best male ass to pin

Take the prime cut baby

Lick up what your daddy did

With that two hundred dollar hair cut

Like a bench warrant  

She pumps to make him approach her

Like damage because nothing is good enough

The look, the vulva, the chest pressed lover of degenerated lust

Name on a list of wanted lovelies

The wet dream caked slut characters that men pretend

When light switches fly, bodies don’t need faces

Blank black want roar like a bleached heart torn

Whistling for a stalk down the gore lens of Pamplona

A missile bloodied up grime juggernaut flaunting for a hero

Woman wants a champion to pin her down

Leak out her loneliness to say

This is magic open and crawling to be made

Done married to nothing, the vast crunch of deadly sheer wants

This stench is something

Letting go of ripped off costume placebo glue

On and off wrapped and pasted into conversation blood lettings

Give me glitter, pasties and g string

Give me stretch marks and pissing the money from the track

On suds and Miss Elle Dorado busting out

Burlesque with a pool cue

Like a fool’s draught sucked down, imbibed with naked wonder

That this moment was performance art

To be a whore for him and licked from lip to lip

Slit like feral hunger

As if the man were a wolf smacking flesh aromatic

Killing her as she wanted at his fetishism

Open and racked her on a pillory of ashes

Melting for redemption for being so god damn boring

To quit the stuck mannequin for Wall Street and daddy’s magazine epitome

She scoffed at flat curvy and wild throb to feel erudite and timeless

Admit she wanted to be a stripper too and dance

Dance for the gawk men wrestling their pant legs

To find the space she was taking from them by the minute

By the turn jangling and it was everything

The universe became an orbit of blood wandering in sheets

Of back row inches down parading in the unshaven army of barfly husbands

Balladeers of the time clock; the god damn time clock

Making babies out of men taking, taking, taking moments

Away from the civilized mothers and wives who would not

Do what she would, because she could dance

She could move like a live-in devil poking back the tuxedo dry suits

Of neck tie slut men hawking oil filters and post office deliveries

Something the machine needed because it was always fucking hungry

The insatiable beast of the day job churning out the dead

Like Nazi bulimia floating Jews in the canals of Pittsburgh

Rotting rivers of showmanship smoking steel and

Detroit rubbers to fuck the night shifts for trying

For god damn trying; don’t try!

She says, “Don’t try, because trying is putrid.” 

Bukowski’s Birthday 8/16/2014 International House New Orleans part 3

Hatred of wanting and the hell always begins with the wanting

That is where the armies start with the wanting

The drum beat bullets of men hiding behind awful banners

Of country or book or corporate ticker immune and not afraid

Lost fear because the wanting unifies soulless ghosts trying to harvest a soul

Insatiable and genius foaming out eyeballs caulked with violence

Getting on sex and booze of all flavors to make sleep come with the dark

No matter the hour the whores are asking for sleep

No matter the wanting the hate is buried in the crotches of men

Watching her, wanting her, thinking about taking her

They all think they have a chance for that one cunt

Like the sun was enough for all men

No matter how much love she makes the world will keep asking

Until the sun bursts the life beyond the life in her

Is pulsing for the squadron of penises out in the smut chairs

To destroy her like lions that do nothing, hunt nothing, but other lions

Sporting to let the lionesses feed them

Wanting only to knock the other muscle out the line for the privilege

To talk but he does not say he just takes

Because the worthy man takes the evening

Doesn’t pose or strut, he doesn’t give a fuck what she thinks

He just beats there like animal taking, taking, taking

He doesn’t even want her; there are a thousand hers

And she knows it

She knows she is just meat for the night and wants to be more

For Bukowski and feels like wanting and everything is lost in the wanting

Because it makes her flinch, adjust her face for the lion, purses her lips

As she is about to be devoured and spread for nothing but a greased pipe

To slander the machinations of the hoard always wanting

Over the classical opera of day jobs and beer bottles

Flung out windows for the listeners to slap commentary

To the awe of the circus freak writing and writing

Hating himself for being a phony

Letting the wanting leaking inside his adjustment

In how does this sound or will the audience ear up

Pay homage to his slut poetry prancing

He hates them all like a firing range line them up

Battle bullets punk-pluck every fucker

Wiping their noses with his shit spread everywhere

In grunt words of nonsense schooled in posing angel hells

Wandering down into his ears

When he rents sanity at the typewriter page after page out of him

Because writers understand writers having to get it out

Like this in a room fool of ogling strangers ogling bar glasses

And the crotches of folded panties bunched in corners

Writers hate writers more than any type of asshole

Because writers can point out the hypocrisy

The bastards are the most dangerous of all the fuckers

So we hate you like we hate ourselves

Because writers know there is no way out

Not if you’re any good or horrible because

The hell is that you wanted to be found

Writers write to be found; the wanting is in the documentation

The preserved history of the moment tattled on and yelled aloft

For the fucker vultures to fund bellied up to the bar

Crying like a divorced son of a bitch pining

About the pussy that gives him hell and the child-support

And the ass that cost him the ability to write about anything else

For those years and he drinks to her every night for the goddess she is

Muse above muses for the isolation like food to gnaw at the bone

The fucker could finally eat like steak every night

Some good god damn meat raw real hell

Other writers could jerk off at the blackness of his darkness

That this ex-wife was pure Midas inspiration

Like a terrorist attack or child molestation

The good shit, the pure cocaine from the mountain

Where they don’t ask; they just kidnap your fucking family

Bound you up in a shed like a South American guerilla vacation

Penned in a wooden pit, stuck like a pig

Bukowski’s Birthday 8/16/2014 International House New Orleans part 4

Oh my the paint of that bitch

She wrenches it out on Mondays to Saturdays

Saves Sundays for Jesus

Thinking about him with her

Is like rubbing her cunt right in his face

Rust musty cod fish slippery and hot

To smear the pages between her folds and vibrate

For the stone roll of the virgin one sees

She’s a god damn miracle shined up and peach

For the asshole to pay up for the kids he doesn’t see

And the asshole writes; he writes like a fucking chimpanzee

Whacking until the typewriter screams

And pants like a wretch for him to stop

And he’s giving it to her, giving it until the oil in the metal

Fights back for the slow churn thoughts at the women

All their slut touching and wanting him to dance

Full cup art into pieces for her pleasure

Makes hers hot at how much work she makes him do

That she got him to want and care and when she did that

They both knew he was dead

Dead because in that moment he couldn’t walk away

All he could do was write in a dungeon alone

But he could never be alone again

She had polluted it all with the talk of other men’s wanting

The smutty mortgaged houses, silk ties, land rovers, and ample seating

To fuck in the rear and afford the bard’s pages and dancing heels

Macked-out and primed slanted down beautiful

Because now she is taller than him and the glare

Makes him smaller and smaller

Until he fits in a glass of Cutty Sark and ice

And he walks in there god damn melting

Just melting like an ink forest of white

And nothing he writes will ever make it anywhere

No matter how much he drinks

The glass is just bubbling over and over in watered down shit

Shit brained lion words running to fight another lion

Then sleep plopping down drunk and ninety percent dead

From the insides, the eight to five busy hum of the strut

Kept him from writing, kept him from being with the lights

And the beautiful ugly he was mesmerized to salivate for a tickle

And a piece of ass and fucking her didn’t’ give him any new words

All the words were dead

Just bodies rolling over bodies

Yawning after giving head and

Running dicks through honey comb

Wondering

If this is it? 

Did this use to do it?

Did the hell come out the end of this pipe?

Sucking and sucking through a bent straw

For the sex and the curvy slap of hell toll

To be prepared and the scene makes him scream awful

To ask where are all the god damn real women who can get me off?

With legs like road maps scuffed up like interstate exit gas station bathrooms

Rammed in for when you have to, you god damn have to

The back seat won’t do it or the lights are too bright

The fuckers run in without thinking and the blank out is glorious

Like Puccini or Wagner or some hellacious fucker who knew

How to make a god damn riot for the money men

To get laid by the queens of silky old money who needed priming to fuck well

To get nectar out of that peach was perdition, but

The restroom of a New Jersey Texaco was heaven

Slipping ass flung on the sink, lifting skirt and driving it

As she shimmied for the hell dog barking to be loved

As the universe warped away

For all the China and snow skis masking tape scenery, crown molding

Give him a stall, cigarettes flung in a urinal and a pounding door

The bottle tipped and flowing, flowing, flowing

And I’ll show you why a writer just has to, just has to